I used to be in the camp "100k msvs ought to be enough for everyone", but now realized there are private conversations that are also subject to that limit, and am now pissed off at Slack.

most of the conversations are private in fact :)

That surprises me so much when I hear it

me too, but that’s what the stats say

actually, I guess that’s not what they say, but for some reason I thought it was

https://clojurians.slack.com/stats

oh, if you look at where messages are sent, it’s about even

In many ways, it would be ideal for communities if Slack had an option to disallow DMs altogether (since we all have other ways to send direct messages to each other). Slack has an option to export all public communications from a workspace -- but even the owner(s) cannot get at private channels and DMs.

The even split of public/private sent messages seems to hold across nearly all of the community Slack's I'm in, regardless of size.

Under DM for self, it shows: https://imgur.com/a/7tJwt So I keep some notes there, and infer "public channel has 10k limit, private DMs are persistent" Then, I go search for something just now -- and reailze -- self DMs are persistent, DMs with other people vanish.

I didn't realize self-DMs persisted. Good to know.

I would expect the ratio to be more like 10-20% are DMs

@dominicm You'd think... but a lot of people in communities send a lot of DMs apparently...

But why. To who.

I'm expecting malevolence. A p2p botnet using community slacks for example.

I talk more to people I know than in the public channels here, just as a data point.

Sometimes you just want to talk shop with someone or know who’s got the answer to a question, or heaven forfend keep up socially.

I do that sometimes too, I'm just surprised that makes up so many.

I think the way o do the math is: suppose there's a channel with 1000 people; people are going to self 'rate limit' (otherwise the channel becomes useable); on the other hand, for each of the 1000 people, if they talk to 10 people on DMs, each of those private conversations can have high bandwidth (since thedre's only two people discussing)

I do a lot of support via DM, once the conversation gets too specific to a particular problem to be useful to anyone else.

Plus just general chatting nonsense too.

Also when doing support sometimes people send things they don’t want public (code snippets, logs etc)

I'm trying to understand why restricted DMs is angering me so much, I suspect it is something like this: if wikipedia told me: you can only view 10 free articles / month, after that, get paid plan, I'd be okay with it but if gmail told me: you can only view 10 most recent emails; after that, get paid plan, I'd be pissed for whatever reason, my "DMs" feel a lot more like mine than channel history, and Slack holding "my" conversations hostage is really pissing me off